Yandex Cloud outage follows drone attacks on three Russian data centers

Russian cloud service provider Yandex says three of its data centers were damaged in drone attacks, forcing two facilities to shut down and leaving a third operating at reduced capacity.

The damage has caused service outages for Yandex customers, with some users reporting that they can no longer access files stored on the company’s cloud infrastructure.

Three Yandex data centers damaged in drone attacks

The affected data centers are located in:

• Sasovo: Attacked on October 8 and no longer operating.
• Kaluga: Attacked on October 9 and operating at reduced capacity.
• Vladimir: Attacked on October 11 and no longer operating.

The attacks are believed to have been carried out by the Ukrainian military in an attempt to cause widespread business disruption, according to the BBC. Yandex said that no injuries were reported in connection with the incidents, according to its official statement.

Yandex Cloud customers report file access problems

Yandex, Russia’s largest technology company, operates search, mapping, navigation, ride-hailing, delivery, shopping, streaming, email, cloud storage, and business cloud infrastructure services. The company is sometimes described as the “Google of Russia.”

Much of Russia’s internet infrastructure, including services used by government and private-sector organizations, relies on Yandex infrastructure.

Yandex said its teams are working around the clock to maintain services and assist affected customers and partners. However, the company has not provided a reliable timetable for restoring normal operations.

“Remaining resource configurations are considered unstable,” Yandex said in a status update.

“The platform’s mode of operation is emergency. We recommend using other alternative disaster recovery plans. Technically supported communication channels may be unstable.”

Yandex urged customers to use alternative infrastructure for disaster recovery while the company responds to the outages.

Yandex Cloud services remain unstable

According to the latest update, Yandex’s console, API, IAM, Container Registry, database, S3 storage, and Kubernetes services were available, although users continued to experience performance and availability issues.

Compute, AI Studio, and security services were partially available, while Monium remained offline.

One Yandex customer reported that backups to Yandex Disk had not displayed thumbnails since October 8. The customer also said previously uploaded files could not be downloaded, according to a report on Habr.

Other users reported HTTP 302 redirects, HTTP 504 gateway timeout errors, and HTTP 500 errors when attempting to access or manage files.

Possible connection to disruption of far-right accounts

European Parliament member Tomasz Zdechovský highlighted a possible link between the Yandex outage and a sudden drop in communications from online accounts promoting far-right views in Germany.

Yandex has not addressed whether data stored in the affected data centers has been irretrievably lost. The status of customer data therefore remains unclear.

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